Modern Family - "Party Crasher" - Review

For a show like Modern Family, there’s usually a theme (or moral to the story) for each week’s episode. And the montage at the end of the episodes with the voiceover sometimes feels grafted onto the episode, when in fact many of those stories for the week don’t exactly fit together. In other instances, sometimes the montage (like in last week’s “New Year’s Eve”) fails to capture the theme as nicely as they could, which is the case for this week’s episode. To me it’s obvious though, it’s not “milestones” as Jay tells us at the end, but “kids”.

The series has constantly returned to the well for stories on parent-child relations to make the point of how important they are. At its heart, the show is about family and why we care about our family. We’re meant to understand that even when they’re at eachother’s throats that the Dunphy, Pritchetts, and Delgados are one big, weird, happy family. But it’s not enough to say: “Okay, this is a functional family unit that likes one another”; we have to be given proof, and much of last season failed to give me proof and then attached a sentimental moment and a voice-overed montage and simply expected me feel all warm and cuddly about it. But that’s not the case; the groundwork has to be laid out for the dust levels in the room to start suddenly rising. The series has been doing a much better job of this this season, and it’s been doing it most successfully when it confronts its parent-children relations.  

Jay and Gloria are about to have a new kid. Their story is all about what having a new kid is going to entail for life once it arrives. Manny is feeling neglected, fretting over the soon to be here baby. Jay and Gloria get to have another adventure, and Gloria thinks that this type of adventure (where they do a lot of illegal things – including stealing a cake, and illegally exiting a parking garage) won’t be happening anymore. Jay, however, lets her know that that’s simply not true. Having a baby is a new adventure, even though it’s not exactly the same as the adventures they had today. 

Sometime down the line that baby is going to be Lily, a precocious toddler stirring up trouble. Mitchell can’t figure out what’s wrong with Cam. He believes that Cam still isn’t adjusting to work. Turns out though that Cam’s doing fine at work (as his surprisingly good troupe of acapella singers prove), but feels that now his relationship with Lily is being hurt for it. Lily stages a wedding where she “marries” Mitchell, and Cam wonders why she didn’t choose him. Cam keeps accidentally hurting Lily in his attempts to feel included. Of course Cam is just going a little crazy and being a little obsessive. Well, kids can do that to you.

Much further down the road, your kid is going to be Haley. They’re going to grow up and all that baby and toddler trauma you’ve put yourself through to raise them will be in the past. But as a parent, your responsibility to your kid isn’t going to end. Haley is dating a slimey jean designer from the store she works at. Phil wants to nip it in the bud immediately, but Claire knows that if she lets this simmer for a bit that Haley will show her hand and run like hell away from this jerk. Haley eventually does, but she’s angry at her parents for not intervening and for treating her differently since she screwed up at college. Without realizing it, Phil lets her know that she’s always going to be his little girl, and nothing is going to stop him from looking out for her. 

The series parallels its stories really well when it wants to. Sometimes it’s far too blunt with these connections of people doing similar things or dealing with life events at different stages. Here it’s almost too subtle with the point. That milestone crap Jay spews out at the end only fits because the baby arrives, and on some level the Laws of Sitcom demand we’re force fed a message about how damn significant this moment is, as if we’re not already clear on that fact. What’s more interesting to me is what the forthcoming of such an event does to people. How do people react to this, and how does it cause them to reevaluate their own lives? We got that in the above three stories. Though it wasn’t Modern Family’s best or funniest work yet, it handled these stories nicely. But that’s the point the show is at in its lifespan. It’s ceased to be as consistently funny as it was when it first started, but the creative forces haven’t given up on effectively telling stories about these characters, who, when dealt with properly, are fun to spend time with. 

Stray Observations:

-Sarah Hyland and Ty Burrell have been having a great season this season. And here they totally sell the wonderful emotional moment where they admit their true feelings about Haley’s douche boyfriend. Great staging as well with the elevators. Even when the series fails to be as funny; when its still telling its stories well, it usually does some nice emotional work and this season has a lot of memorable, touching moments.

-I don’t know about everyone else, but I loved the jean related jokes: “What are you 32-34?” “What are you 36-38?”, “Just trying to get into girl’s jeans”, “I had to reach underneath your jeans”

-“We always knew there’d be a strong possibility she’d be a bad driver”

-My notes on Jay and Gloria’s illegal rumpus: “STEALING CAKE!” How does a series with such a black and white view of things make no commentary on the questionable nature of what they did? It usually skirts that line, but doesn’t cross it.  
-Jay and Gloria's new baby is here! We'll see how well the show handles this.

Grade: B-

What did everyone else think?

Happy Endings - "The Ex Factor" - Review

Here I’ve been badmouthing Happy Ending the past few episodes, and then it goes and does “The Ex Factor”, one of its best episodes to date.

I enjoyed all three of the stories, but let’s start with Penny’s because it’s really at the heart of why this episode is great. Penny’s boyfriend feels like they only hang out with Penny’s friends. He asks if they can hang with his friends for once. Penny dislikes the idea but agrees to it anyway. When they’re hanging out with them, Penny assumes their crazy and weird like her own friends, but turns out their pretty normal (they enjoy discussing the debt ceiling! How more normal can you get?). She immediately pegs the guy who talks about the debt ceiling to be Dave (because he’s talking about something she thinks no one cares about). But then the rest of the group says that nope that’s the sort of thing that matters to them. When another friend spills wine on themselves, she loads on her not realizing that they don’t make fun of other people at their expense. Penny is BAFFLED. What sorcery is this?! Penny is the meta-commentator for this episode. She’s the oddball in this group of normal people, and her awkwardness and feelings of not fitting in show just how damn bizarre and dickish the Happy Endings friends can be. It’s only to them that their antics seem normal (“No hijinks or taking a miniature pig to a car dealership to make point on gender roles?” Penny asks aghast).

When Penny returns to the other two stories and begins making meta-commentary on them, the payoff is so good, so funny, and so in line with the sort of humor Happy Endings does well that it ties together an episode that was already very funny, and very well-grounded. 

Brad, meanwhile, doesn’t want to have dinner when Jane’s ex comes to town. But he changes his mind when he discovers that Ryan is actually a girl who Jane dated during her lesbian phase. Now he wants to hear all the dirty, sexy details of their relationship, but ends up being turned off when he finds out that they told eachother that they “loved” eachother way back when. Brad, of course, doesn’t take this well, and invites his own ex over the next night. This devolves into an incredibly uncomfortable dinner party.

Penny doesn’t possibly think the other story could be any more interesting, and she’d be wrong. Max has a new roommate who’s very cool, but he never sees. Dave and Alex find him so cool; they convince Max to try to hang out with him. They wait up for him as an excuse to hang out with him. But his roommate is nowhere to be found, and so they track him down. Only to discover that he’s been using the apartment to secretly cheat on his wife, crashing his date and wrecking his marriage.

The Happy Endings gang (who need to get some official name coined for them. Somebody get on that!) is not exactly the most likable group of people. When the guy in the booth next to them says, “Shut the fuck up” in “Fowl Play/Date”, it’s another sign that to the outside world this is a co-dependent, selfish, narcissistic group of individuals who do some pretty stupid and bad things towards one another, and in general. The fact that its often incredibly funny and capsizing over with jokes sometimes makes up for this fact, but a self-awareness (the series is pretty self-aware to begin with but this is furthest it’s gone) helps alleviate many of the problems it has with its plotting and characters. Meeting your boyfriend’s friends, meeting your wife’s ex, and trying to befriend a new roommate, those are all things that most of us can relate to. Adding a mad-dashed sprinkle of crazy, a bountiful amount of jokes, and an appropriate level of meta-ness, well that’s all for the better. 

Stray Observations:

-“You can’t have disposable income when you are $11,000 and 3 cats in debt to us” “You will get your cats when you get your cats!”

-“We’re not going to have a threeway”

-“Hope he doesn’t weasel his way into my life like my last roommate”

-“… And that’s how I gave my mother my kidney”

-“…We just stripped down to our tank tops, and talked about feminist theory all night long… and that was it”

-“He definitely got eaten by a bear”

-“A real gentleman saves somebody from a well and never talks about it again”

-“We hardly ever use tiny farm animals to solve our problems”

-Dave fails at the “Dramatic Chair Swivel”.

-“Chad and Lisa had a baby” “Really?” “Probably …”

Grade: A

New Girl - "A Father's Love" - Review

For a show like New Girl, the arrival of a parent, is meant to provide us insight into how a character became the way they are. We see this in “Parents” where we finally meet Jess’s mom and pops, and it clicks for how Jess became the queer fairy creature that she is. Here Nick’s father is so clearly uninterested in the well-being of his son and only in town to make a quick buck (and feel good about himself for popping in on his son).  

His appearance also allows the series to return to the well-worn fighting between Nick and Jess (who care about eachother deeply but whose world views don’t really mesh well together). Jess and Nick are polar opposites. Nick is cynical, grouchy, and quick to judge. Jess is hopeful, wide-eyed, and optimistic: she tries to see the best in people. When put together, the clashing of their world views often brings out the best in New Girl. Nick is mistrustful of his dad with a conman past, but Jess wants to give him the benefit of the doubt. Well, Nick’s not wrong; his dad sees how easy it will be to swindle Jess who is just a tad too trusting of people. We saw this before in “The Landlord” where Jess kept denying Nick’s claims that their landlord was hitting on Jess and doing favors so she’d sleep with him. Nick was right then and he’s right now. And as where last time that led dangerously close to an awkward threeway, Nick is pushed to make a trade where he’s attempting to sell a horse to mobsters (apparently horse semen is big over in India – Um, yea, don’t ask). In a great callback, his inability to not sweat when he lies blows the whole deal. Jess is left deeply unnerved by the whole situation. She put her trust in this guy, and he let her down. She (and we) finally get a sense of why Nick is as damaged and mistrusting as he is. It’s surprising he’s not any worse than he is. 

While Nick and Jess are clashing over Nick’s dad, Schmidt and Robbie (Cece’s most recent ex-boyfriend) are teaming up to find a way to break up Cece’s date arranged by her mother. They both want her back, and they scheme to find a way to ruin the whole thing. When they show up at her apartment, finding her family and her suitor’s family, they embarrass her and themselves. Even worse when Robbie unintentionally racistly yells, “White guy power!” Schmidt and Cece seem destined to end up together (so do Nick and Jess – which makes the paralleling of these stories interesting), and this sort of thing does not bode well for Schmidt getting back with her. It’s totally in character though; Schmidt would do something idiotic like this to try to win her back, and it probably would end miserably. 

Nick’s dad and Cece really aren’t what the stories are about though. They’re there as conversation starters between our characters. The shared feelings of Schmidt and Robbie creates an unexpected bond, while the arrival of Nick’s dad serves to test Nick and Jess’s relationship (while also highlighting who Nick is). While its fairly obvious from the start that Nick’s dad is every bit as bad as he makes him out to be and Schmidt’s plans are of course going to end poorly, it’s still charming and heartfelt and very funny, and the show gets more out of it than most series do. 

Stray Observations:

-A new game from New Girl: “What’s in the Cup?” – Nick can’t figure it out while his dad can.

-“Who’s going to mess with a guy wearing a hat that says ‘girls go bills’? … Everyone... Everyone did” – Winston is underutilized once again, but gets off some of the episodes funniest lines.

-“…That’s why they called him ‘little penis’”

-“He looks like Hilary Swank mixed with a small wet puppy”

-“Do you think she saw me?” “Well, you weren't wearing a hat”

-“How do you eat an elephant?” “With chopsticks” “No” “In a taco” “…One bite at a time”

-“There’s more to A Father’s Love than semen”

-“I’d be Brad Pitt … You’d be the crafty Asian fellow who did the crazy flips”

-“This is my first late nigh parking lot horse deal”

-“If you’re going to work on my sink, at least put goggles on. Your eyes are twice the size of normal eyes”

-Many hilarious jokes in Schmidt and Robbie’s ideas to win back Cece. My favorite: “We could get a Trojan Horse” “In this economy?”

Grade: B

Cougar Town - "I Need to Know" - Review

One of the most important things in life are our relationships. Cougar Town is about its seven main characters and how they relate to one another. Each episode, in a way, is about throwing something at a couple different pairings and seeing how they react to it (and in the process reinforcing why these people care about eachother in the first place). Cougar Town is great at making these conflicts very specific to the characters and grounded in a level of everyday realism. It’s also really good at creating emotional resolutions that aren’t just tacked on at the end of the episode as an afterthought.

This week’s episode is about Jules and Travis, and Ellie and Andy. Jules and Ellie want something out of their relationships that they simply can’t have. In the case of Jules, Travis has grown up and is off at college. He doesn’t need or want to see his mother on a regular basis. When she tries to give him some space, saying he doesn’t have to call her unless he wants to, she can’t handle him going nine days without contact. She calls him, but he quickly ends the conversation. Jules becomes so infuriated that she storms over to Travis’s school and tells all his friends that she still does his laundry. 

Ellie, at the suggestion of Bobby, starts rewarding Andy for doing what she asks of him (much like you would a dog – a joke the episode gets a good deal of mileage from). Bobby, however, is not one to idly sit by and watch this. He tells Andy, and Andy becomes understandably upset.

Now, everything up to this point is funny, but it works because we know who these characters are and that this is totally the sort of things they would do. And Jules and Andy would become upset and angry. But ultimately, they could never hold it against Travis or Ellie. Its sitcom mechanics that never feels like it’s going through the motions. Because the series goes for character work and a sense of place more than big laughs, it doesn’t try so hard to achieve its plotting and resolutions. Lack of resolutions can even feel awkward (e.g. Travis running off to Hawaii). 

So Jules goes to Travis and lets him know she’s so very happy for him, but she doesn’t want to end up a granny who never speaks to her son. Ellie opens up past her cold exterior (“I find it confusing when you’re vulnerable,” Andy tells her). Though she wanted Andy to do what she wanted him to do, what she wants more than anything is him. This could be a mission statement for the show. There’s conflicts between characters where each wants a different thing, but what they really want more than anything is eachother and for eachother to be happy. That’s why they can resolve these problems and it doesn’t feel forced or hackneyed. Trav is going to go off and do his own thing, but it doesn’t hurt to stop in and watch Game of Thrones with Jules every now and again. And he doesn’t do it because the Laws of Sitcom demand it but because it’s in the feelgood, low key, heartwarming DNA of Cougar Town. 

Stray Observations:

-Opening Title Card of the Week: “The letters in... Cougar Town can be rearranged to spell ‘Taco Rug’Now" (which also makes no sense).”

-The Cul-de-Sac Crew want Travis’s new girlfriend to feed Tom’s cat while he’s away: “I don’t live in the area” – To which they cry: EXCUSES!

-“I watched porn with Grayson and his girlfriend” –Many people have misinterpreted Game of Thrones as porn as well.

-“It’s like a brand new gay Ferrari” –The Grayson/Laurie storyline, though funny, felt out of place.

-Jules to Travis: “I want to be friends with benefits” – that came out wrong.

-The guys grow Tom Selleck moustaches. Because of course they would.

-“Trav will come back, you raised him to be dependent and helpless”

-“I must have butt dialed you” “From the Torres’ home?”

-Andy and Jules going “Oh” was very funny and adorable.

-“Once Trav ran away to Key Largo … I had to sell my soul to a Haitian shaman to get him back”

-“She was a real…” “Racist” “I was going to say collector”

Grade: B+

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" - Film Review

It’s difficult to get a good performance out of a young actor. Most children and young adults can put on a nice baby face and give a big grin for the camera, but the performances often tend to fail to have nuance. It’s even more difficult when you have to get a young actor to bring to life very serious material. Recent performances, especially on television, have proven it possible. Morgan Saylor’s quiet, nervous energy is wonderful on Homeland. Maisie Williams is incredibly charismatic and raw as Arya Stark on Game of Thrones. Kiernan Shipka has turned into one of the stealthily good performances on Mad Men as Sally Draper. Even on the big screen it’s not unheard of. Shailene Woody gives a great performance with some heavy, dramatic material in The Descendants. Other young actresses such as Saoirse Ronan and Chloe Grace Moretz have shown themselves capable of confidently inhabiting tricky roles. (Now that I consider it, there are not as many recent young male examples. The last truly solid one I can think of is Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense.). Long story short, though it’s not unheard of for young actors to pull off weighty material, it’s rather difficult and that’s why it’s always great to see young, talented actors demonstrate their ability. All the more impressive when they’re only 5 years old, as Quvenzhané Wallis was when she played Hushpuppy in Beast of the Southern Wild.

We see almost the entirety of the film through Hushpuppy’s young, optimistic, imaginative eyes. Too young to always comprehend all the things going on around her; she doesn’t get many of the implications of the tragedies and triumphs surrounding her. But she’s got a big heart, and tries to see the best in people. Abandoned by her mother, she’s raised by her sickly, quick-tempered father Wink (Dwight Henry), who, though he often doesn’t show it as well as he ought to, loves her a great deal. They live in the “Bathtub” an isolated, impoverished Louisiana bayou community, constantly struggling to get by, but with a strong sense of community. Their lives and those of the community are imperiled when a deadly storm threatens to destroy the town. 

The film deals with the community’s struggles with poverty and their attempts to protect their homes from the storm with integrity, realism, and compassion. Gorgeously shot, and imaginatively depicted, it provides a dignified, realistic, memorable look at an under-looked part of the country and the everyday concerns of the people who live there. Wallis handles the very serious material with surprising ease, and you never once question her performance; she carries the film with a brightness and enthusiasm that help raise the film above its world weary, dreary undertones. This is a great debut film from writer and director Benh Zeitlin; hopefully we see more from him in the future.  

Grade: B+

How I Met Your Mother - "Band or DJ" - Review

After coming off its strongest episode of the season in its mid-season finale (something arguably true of last season’s “Symphony of Illumination”), How I Met Your Mother returns for more stall tactics. Now, stall tactics aren’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, many of the best series make an excellent practice of it (Older series such as The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood made very good use of a slow burn with minimal plot advancement doled out each episode, and more recent ones, such as Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and Justified have been just as successful). But HIMYM isn’t exactly the best series at stalling the inevitable; especially when we know what the inevitable is (The show’s title has been spoiling it for us for nearly 8 years now).

This isn’t to say “Band or DJ” is bad (it’s not; there’s a couple nice jokes and one excellent, touching scene between Ted and Lily), but it’s thoroughly grounded in saying: “trust me, we’re going to get there, and it will be great … but in the meantime, here’s some stories you don’t really care about to kill time”.

The jokes aren’t exactly laugh out loud funny either. There’s some chuckle worthy stuff that’ll put a smile to your face, but very few jokes make you go, “OH MY GOD THAT’S GREAT!” But that’s just par for the course for the show since they introduced Zoey. Which isn’t to say HIMYM suddenly got bad in its 6^th season; there was a predictable decline going on at times during the fourth (which has one of the series’ weakest episodes in the form of its finale “The Leap”)  and fifth (Don and Robin’s relationship in hindsight is so very, very pointless and ends incredibly abruptly) seasons. But the 6^th season changed my expectations of the show completely. The zippy pace and great jokes weren’t there; the use of narrative perspective and time to make jokes wasn’t as apparent. We got storylines that were so very strange and misplaced: particularly Zoey but also the death of Marshall’s dad (which wasn’t a bad story but came so suddenly, unexpectedly, inorganically and just felt cruel to do to the character). Zoey was the worst aspect of it though: she was a very obvious stalling tactic; very early on we’re told she’s not the one, and the show established a relationship we had no reason to root for and made little sense in the first place with the two so clearly always at odds with one another. 

So when a comedy series is stalling, it needs to do one of two things: be really damn funny or earn some nice emotional moments. HIMYM hasn’t really been selling me on either. Just look at “Who Wants to Be a Godparent”. It’s Marshall and Lily hosting a game show to determine who will be their kids God-parent, when we know good and well it’ll end up being all three of them in the end; throw in some very obvious, not particularly funny jokes and you can see why all this stalling is deeply unsatisfying. 

So what’s stalling us this week? 

Robin finds out Barney didn’t ask for her father’s permission for marriage, and Barney spends the rest of the episode getting the answer we always knew he’d get (although, it’s eventually with the help of Robin who won’t let her father come to the wedding if he doesn’t accept). I mean, there’s more to it than that, but that’s pretty much the gist to it. 

Ted and Lily fight over who gets to plan Robin and Barney’s wedding. Ted wants a DJ, and Lily a band. But then the band/DJ thing devolves into a weird metaphor for Ted being unhappy about Robin’s engagement. Lily finally gets episodic time dedicated to a story that isn’t involving Marshall or her new baby (something that hasn’t happened in so damn long! Alyson Hannigan can act people. Give her some more material!), in which she gets Ted to admit he still likes Robin (in exchange for her admitting  how having a kid can be frustrating enough at times that she considers leaving).

All in all, we’ve seen worse forestalling the inevitable from this series, and honestly, it was hard to follow up the mid-season finale, so this a good, but not great episode. 

Stray Observations:

-Oh yea, and there’s also some stuff about Marvin not pooping in a while which actually gets some surprisingly good jokes: “I haven’t slept in … January .”

-The “Halloween Theme”-like musical cue when Lily is angry at Ted for trying to usurp her place as wedding planner is wonderful. As is the moment after: “Imma cut you bitch!”

-“Oh, this is just cakes”

-“I bought with some oxen and spices from the East”

-Has Cobie Smulders lost her voice?

-“There’s a cat that says, ‘I can haz cheeseburger?’”

-“I killed a pack of bears, and the pelts to her father. That’s just manners”

-“Anything else I should know?” “I did some wetwork for the CIA in the 80’s”

-“Oh no, Fluffer Nutter just peed on my pants”

-The confetti-poop metaphor pays off in a nice visual joke.

-Robin’s dad was planning on getting a divorce from his wife in order to make Robin happy. Robin’s dad is crazy.

-I cannot stress enough how much I liked the rooftop scene between Lily and Ted. The show is lacking moments like this.

-Ted’s future wife is apparently in the wedding band. MYTHOLOGY!

Grade: B

What did everyone else think?

Bob's Burger - "Nude Beach" - Review

When I saw the title for this episode, “Nude Beach”, I knew I was in for something good. However, the nude beach isn’t actually the biggest element of the episode; it’s Bob’s relationship with Hugo the health inspector. The episode deals with the fairly typical sitcom situation of two individuals hating eachother and swearing eachother off, before realizing that they actually need eachother. But in the hands of Bob’s Burgers, there’s a weird charm about it, not to mention the fact that a good portion of the episode deals with a nude beach, something I don’t think you’d find in a standard sitcom.

Hugo has been a massive pain in Bob’s ass, constantly finding the most minor of infractions to hold against him. Bob wishes he didn’t have to deal with him. When Hugo goes to close down a nude beach with health violations, he ends up turning into a convert of the nudist lifestyle and abandoning his post as health inspector. A new, much more lenient health inspector Tommy shows up and befriends Bob. Tommy’s a little weird, but he’s making life at the restaurant so much easier that Bob is forced to tolerate him. But Tommy keeps asking favor after favor, until he’s staging a rock and roll show at the restaurant. Only problem is that Tommy is God-awful. He sings songs about his daddy issues and how good he is at sex, and drives away customers (except Teddy who is oddly loyal). Bob knows that this can’t last much longer, but when he breaks the news to Tommy, he doesn’t take it well, he pulls some rat poop out of his pocket (which apparently has been there the whole time), and shuts the restaurant down. The only way for Bob to save the restaurant is to convince Hugo to become a health inspector again. Hugo takes up a bet where if Bob wins the nude decathlon, he’ll return. So Bob out of sheer desperation strips down and does every event before losing in the final round to Hugo. Hugo however realizes that he wants it to be him and not some other person who shuts down Bob’s restaurant and so rescues the place.

The Belcher children meanwhile see an easy way to make cash, exploiting horny teenage boys’ desire to see nude women. They find a great vantage point of the beach and Tyler (who, played by Aziz Ansari, helped Bob play videogames in “Burgerboss”) provides them with a telescope (“basically the Hubble for boobies”) for them to check out the action. The boys are initially turned off because its nudity in all its ugly, messy glory, but Louise (in an exceptional, hilarious monologue) sells it: this is better than the nudity in magazines, THIS IS REAL LIFE! The kids end up raking in a lot of dough, even taking bets on the nude decathlon.

The series is so willing to show people doing things (things that other shows might make out to be bad or weird or wrong) and then doesn’t judge them for it. Bob and Linda have been shown to drink A LOT. Louise has practically tried to kill people on more than one occasion. And the kids are seen here ripping off people they know, while multiple characters choose to go to the nude beach and get naked. But it never makes a statement about the nude beach; it never goes out of its way to suggest that nude beaches are weird or wrong. It just makes them out to be a matter of life. In some places there happens to be nude beaches. If someone wants to go there, who are we to judge? The nude beach is almost an afterthought actually. So much of the episode is dealing with Bob putting up with Tommy and his antics that the nude beach, which felt like it would be the driving force for the story, is sidelined.  

  

Stray Observations:

-“Hands off my hands government!”

-“That’s how vendors sold food in the Bible” “Don’t bring religion into this!”

-Andre Royo (aka Bubbles from The Wire) appears in the training video on how to wash your hands.

-“It’s like the Internet but outside!”

-“We’ll be like the Louis and Clarke of nudity”

-“Where’s your fanny pack?” Hugo pulls up his belly fat to reveal his fanny pack.

-“We’re bushwhacking the a trail to the nude overlook”

-“He’s the new Hugo” “Well, there’s only one Hugo”

-“No sweat off our ass!” – Belcher children are totally cool with cursing.

-“Do you like rock?” “Like rock … music … yea” – Great delivery by H. Jon Benjamin.

-“I think dad just got to second base with that guy”

-Louise’s sales pitch: “All the dingles! All the dongles”

-“You strike me as more of an indoor nerd”

-Tommy’s other song: “That Elderly Prostitute” –An instance where saying is better than showing.

-The superimposing of Tommy singing over the nude beach was really weird.

-Tommy doesn’t even bother dumping the rat poop out of the bag; he drops the bag on the ground.

-Tommy is now at Jimmy Pesto’s. How kind of Hugo. 

Grade: B

What did everyone else think?